Unmute! Listening for Religion in the Age of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted our lives. It disrupted schools, businesses, entertainment venues, and religious institutions. It made us learn, work, and pray remotely, often blurring the boundaries between home and away, private and public, and religious and secular. Via Zoom and live streaming, worship services entered our living rooms and bedrooms, while the sounds of domestic life impinged upon those services in turn. Slow or unstable internet connections limited our communal participation. “Please mute your microphone” entered our religious vocabularies.

The clips in this playlist offer examples of how religious worship was disrupted during the time of COVID. Many of these examples are quite mundane. A baby’s cry interrupts her father’s sermon. A speaker stops to respond to a cell phone ring or notification alert. A participant interjects to inquire about audio quality. Unstable internet connection causes a momentary break or distortion. These sonic disruptions can signal more profound shifts and transformations, however. They make audible how difficult it was to sustain concentration on any single task or activity during this time. They demonstrate how factors like unequal access to broadband internet or the technological limitations of platforms like Zoom impeded communal worship. And they remind us of the choices communities had to make about whether to mute, thereby centering the voice of a single leader or speaker, or unmute–and embrace the cacophony of multiple asynchronous voices, joining together yet not quite together at the same time.

– Isaac Weiner